Red-Hot Housing Market Shouldn't Change Planning Principles

Are high home prices really due to planners and their crazy processes? The answer is yes and no -- or, perhaps more accurately, no and yes, writes William Fulton: "The recent run-up in prices has occurred not only in the context of California’s typically kooky and complicated planning system, but also in the context of a very peculiar housing market... Planning well usually means resisting short-term economic forces in the service of long-term benefit to the community -- focusing on workforce and low-income housing, for example, instead of permitting developers to build only high-end houses. Equally important to planning well is keeping the plans you make. That means allowing developers to build the housing you want when – as now – the market motivates them to do so. One clear cost that planning imposes on developers is the cost of processing time, a cost that can be fatal if it means that developers miss the hot real estate market and must wait years until the opportunity to build arises again."